Rise of the Facebook-Killers

At the pinnacle of the social network's success, its critics are busy building its replacements

On a cold Friday evening in February two years ago, with a historic blizzard bearing down on the Eastern Seaboard, a small crowd of people bundled into a New York University lecture hall to hear a talk that would become something of a legend, a shot heard 'round the Internet.

The speaker of the evening was Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School and the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center. A stocky man with a white beard, glasses, and a high, nasal voice, Moglen spoke casually and rocked back and forth on his heels as he turned to make eye contact with his audience.

"So, of course, I didn't have any date tonight," Moglen began, deadpan. "Everybody knows that. My calendar's on the Web. The problem is that problem. Our calendar is on the Web. Our location is on the Web. You have a cell phone, and you have a cell-phone-network provider, and if your cell-phone-network provider is Sprint, then we can tell you that several million times last year, somebody who has a law-enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere went to the Sprint website and asked for the real-time location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it. Several million times. Just like that."

Emily Berl

A longtime champion of the free-software movement, Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen predicts Facebook will be extinct in a matter of months.

Emily Berl

An activist and programmer, Sam Boyer is helping to build the Federated General Assembly, a decentralized network designed for the Occupy movement.

In short, Moglen said, "the deal that you get with the traditional service called telephony contains a thing you didn't know, like spying."

Moglen wasn't there to talk about cell-phone surveillance, but it served as a good metaphor for his larger point: The technologies we rely on to stay connected to one another are infected with destructive overlays of surveillance that can only do us harm. Tracing the history of the Internet, Moglen found many culprits in the transformation of the Web into a tool of control and surveillance, but he reserved special blame for one person.

"Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record," Moglen said of the founder of Facebook. "He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age."

Why? Because, Moglen said, Mark Zuckerberg had harnessed the energy of our social desires to talk us into a swindle. "Everybody needs to get laid," Moglen said. "He turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality, and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, 'I will give you free Web hosting and some PHP doodads, and you get spying for free all the time.'"

It was hardly the first time this sort of critique had been leveled against Facebook, but Moglen wasn't just carping.

"I'm not suggesting it should be illegal," Moglen told the audience of the Internet Society of New York. "It should be obsolete. We're technologists. We should fix it."

Fixing it wouldn't be hard, Moglen argued. There's no reason the architecture of a social network has to include the kinds of privacy invasion endemic to Facebook. In fact, the hardware and software necessary to build a network in which people kept direct control of their information, with no middleman, already exists. So Moglen challenged his audience: Build a better system.

The rise of Facebook has been one of the defining stories of the young century. From its (somewhat) humble origins in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 to its present network of more than 800 million people, Facebook has redefined our conception of communication, inaugurating a new age of interconnectedness we call social networking.

To many, Facebook is social networking. It is the medium that brings us together in ways that we couldn't have imagined before, delivering on a promise that was always implicit in the World Wide Web but only partially realized. Facebook offers us a space in which to talk, connect, and share music, pictures, and the stories of our lives, a space to express who we are and learn about one another and our world. We like it. A lot. We spend nearly eight hours a month on the site. By August, 1 billion human beings will be on Facebook.

And now, after building a network unprecedented in history in its breadth and penetration, Facebook is enjoying a further triumph: It's going public with an expected valuation of as much as $100 billion. It's the biggest technology offering ever, and it catapults Facebook into the league of PepsiCo, Verizon, Disney, and Goldman Sachs.

But as the business press and slavering investors look on eagerly at Zuckerberg's coronation, many believe that the seeds of Facebook's downfall have already been sown. The company might have brought people together like never before, but exploitation is woven inextricably into its DNA. Facebook makes its money by commercializing personal information, watching its users, analyzing their behavior, and selling what it learns.

Not everyone finds that troubling, but some people do. They believe that we can have all the benefits of a social network without paying for it with constant surveillance. They imagine alternative networks where users can talk, share, and collaborate with whomever they please without allowing a third party to memorize their face, what they read, and their shopping habits. They imagine that given a choice between a network committed to extracting as much information from them as possible and one with built-in controls and protection, eventually they'll choose the latter. And they're not just imagining these new networks. They're building them now.

Friendica actually has a Facebook connector that works - integrating FB contacts in your stream. That might sound like a compromise in terms of overcoming Facebook's quasi-monopoly... but it tears down the garden walls, which can only be a good thing. Additionally, Friendica integrates a whole range of other networks and protocols: Twitter, Diaspora (seamless), identi.ca/status.net, even email.

The article fails to mention Friendica, increasingly recognised as the most powerful, stable and genuinely decentralised Facebook alternative. Server installation is almost as easy as for WordPress - so you can run your own and control your database completely.

Also, Friendica is easily the most integrative of the decentralised solutions, allowing seamless communication with contacts from Diaspora and integration of your Facebook stream, too. Apart from that, it connects to Twitter, Wordpress, status.net and a few others - and will even integrate good old email into your social networking. It's free as in beer and free as in speech and really worth a try.

The author of this article should have taken a good look at Friendica, widely recognised as the most powerful and stable of the alternatives to Facebook. Unlike other solutions, it is truly decentralised, running on small servers (almost as easy to install as Wordpress). It integrates a host of other networks from Diaspora to Facebook and is updated/enhanced very regularly. You can read more here: http://friendica.com

Remember MySpace? Facebook is just a modified, and perhaps more dynamic, version of that. Why it caught on like it did I'l never understand, I've never had the desire or time to set up a Facebook profile, and now that I know how it makes it's money I am glad I didn't! I think the biggest problem with this site, and other such sites like Twitter and fubar, etc., is calling them "social networking". They are anything but "social", the are as unsocial as humanly possible. While I agree with the story that a useful function Facebook can serve is to find an old friend, or someone you knew for some reason, that you lost touch with and would like to find, there is nothing "social" about staring at a computer monitor and typing on a keyboard. Calling Facebook a "social network" is like calling a jail "a government subsidized sustinence and housing resource"! It has been proven many times over with experiments on animals that if a living organism (people) does not have physical touch and interaction with other such organism's it suffers mentally, and the results can be very bad. If anything Facebook and the like have destroyed social values. Very few people get out and interact with people now as compared to 20 or 30 years ago. After work or the trip to the store they go home and get on their computer, or watch their tv, or both, and any 'contact' happens through technology. I know in the town I live in the number of people you see 'out and about' during the evenings and nights is about 1/2 of what it was in the 80's, and the population is about 50 or 60 percent more. There are times when the number of people you see somewhere on the weekends is less than what it was during the week in the 80's. And the biggest percentage of those out are the college students, whereas in the 80's you would see as many 'locals' as students, and a more age diverse group of people as well. Between TV and computers technology has destroyed the US's social values.

This is funny. When I told a few people I was working on a project to take down facebook, one person reply back tome and old me Google should be your target. I now undertand that if I can take out facebook, Google is just another roadkill. People laugh at such claims like can people walk on the moon some day 1,000 years ago. People laugh at people saying that but now walking on the moon is reality.

Nothing difficult at all. So, to kill Google is not as hard as people might think. I have found my answer to kill Google. This is no joke- I'm going to take out Yahoo, Zynga, Groupon, Ebay, Facebook then offer free searches without bias or adveritssing attachements and eliminate Google easily. The thing is I must take out Yahoo and Zynga and Ebay in the first year of operation. Groupon is dead because I plan to offer half the price of what Groupon charges businesses.

Stay Tuned for the People's Project. We got 7 inventions to take out all these guys but we do need to build data centers in order to do so. That is why once we write up the prototype and get seed funding from angel investors, End of Google in 3 to 5 years. Believe this as if you would believe a man could walk on the moon. Believe this that in the future man can walk on mars. Believe this as man will live on the Mars some day. Believe Google will end up dead just like any company that came before it.Ming.

Investors in Facebook must think twice before they buy this stock because there is always a better company coming out going to replace Facebook in the not too distant future. I'm working on a project exactly going to do that. One way or another, this project is going to come out by late this year ir early next year because it does take funding to do this project. To be able to eliminate Facebook is worth many billions.

I'm going to attempt to take out Ebay, Groupon, Linkedin and then Zynga then deal with Facebook and Yahoo. Google will be my last target as I will offer free unbiased searches in the future. Who needs Google if you can get it for free without bias of advertising?

The Facebook farce is a fraud. They've capitalized on the basis of bogus numbers. There are hundreds of millions of avatars and shills being sold to the corporate rubes as 'real people.' Hey, Romney even handed us our defense: "corporations are people too."

One major problem with unplugging from Facebook is you will lose the ability to comment in other websites, as they require it now. If I want to comment on an article in the local online paper, I have to have a FB account. Because everyone is who they say they are on FB, right?

So what you do this is create a Profile on Face Book as 'Village Idiot', saying your job is to tear away the fabric of Reality ---and, when they 'cleverly' ask 'how' to do this, say: 'Just start at the Horizon & pull upwards!'. Do this now before it becomes illegal to snark @ Faeces Book....

This article makes a number of serious and interesting points. But it will lose its audience after about three paragraphs as the article is long winded shot through with pontificating, in true left wing and academic fashion.And the people who will congregate around Diasopra will probably be just as dull. I wonder what the average demogarphic and age of the audience was. Get over yourselves and think a much more attractive and funky approach, which can reach a wider audience, esp young people. This be done without losing the valid critique in the article. I speak from a committed social justice, leftwing and academic background.

'Unconvinced' below could be excused for not viewing/reading the 'Freedom in the Cloud' talk - I might mention, a presentation of the Internet Society's New York Chapter - as it is not directly linked in the article. It is at http://isoc-ny.org/?p=1338

Oh. please. Could barely stomach the first page of the article and I refuse to read the rest of this drivel. I love how the professor uses "The Social Network," a FICTIONAL movie in case anyone forgot, as his overarching premise on who Mark Zuckerberg is and why he invented Facebook. To get laid? Sounds like the professor is just bitter.

The fact that this website, and every other website, has little f's plastered all over the screen really speaks to how derivative facebook has become to the computer experience. The damage has already been done. There's no escaping facebook. Cheers to anyone who picked up on this social distortion before it became the thing to do.

I agree with you re social media's inherent unsociability, but I know I get out and about less nowadays primarily because of the economy and what money I have doesn't go as far as it used to 20 or 30 years ago.

There are other factors.Technology hasn't destroyed America's social values. Madison Ave, celebrity culture, video games and bad parenting have. Neither of my nephews, ages 7 and 9, could believe it when I told them their mother, father and I lived in a world without the internet. Even a luddite like me has a FB page, a Twitter feed and a flip phone. Texting and email have their uses. If you're using FB and Twitter as your primary means of communication with friends and family, however, then, yes, you have a problem.

... of course the "added-value/benefit" to the socially-interactive, uhm, reductionism (for lack of a better term) you aptly make mention of is, or so would the loyal facebook apologists argue- that within the period of time you speak of violent crime has dwindled across the country; our streets are cleaner and our children safer (though nay would point to a sharp increase in child obesity, their increasingly eroding attention spans or growing propensity toward antisocial behavior, which, is it just me or does it appear for some reason that too often the latter coincides with calls to fund both the study AND treatment of so called "autism spectrum disorders"?).

why just last month the BBC aired some must-be facetious, utterly ridiculous hour long segment titled "how facebook changed the world", its theory being that among intended purposes for the site could be interpreted and included to spurt the "rise of democracy" (or, as democracy in the post tahrir-square-spring-thingy current 'zeitgeist' used to be known as- military dictatorships, no?) across egypt and the arab world.

... as apossed to "how the (arab) world changed facebook", right (and still got, uh, unfriended... defriended... whatevs, yo!)?

... uh, could your repeated posts on here be considered FREE ADVERTISEMENT for your "project", and if so, how 'pryed unto' should the rest of us feel, that is, how interrupted has the experience of our reading and opining on this article been by your de facto (pre) marketting campaign?

silly question yes, but the larger point being (and i think another poster here, Sarino- eluded to this already) that true, corporal (social) interaction continues to be greatly eroded/diminished by the likes/models of facebook, and to this ill your idea appears to offer not a thorough (re)solution, but rather just an(other) alternate version.

... you know, competition; another tame-the-mind computer (wishful) application, if you will; which by the way before reading your replies this morning i had absolutely no idea what 'groupon' or 'zynga' were, and to be perfectly honest, i hardly think i'll so much as bother to look them up, respectively.

That is a hurdle that we need to jump. It's hard but there's no other choice. If we're going to cut FB out of our lives, then we need to send a message to the other websites that use facebook's plugins.

So if a site uses facebook's comments plugin, I don't even see the comments section, which is just as well for me. That site, isn't really encouraging a free dialogue if their using fb's comment plugin. They're just using us to cross-advertise.

On the contrary, Diaspora's community has a wide variety of incredibly interesting people. Artists, writers, developers, designers, musicians, activists, philosophers, etc. There are a lot of people with a passion for higher learning and deeper thinking over there, so I wouldn't be quite so quick to knock it.

Unconvinced, he made one passing comment/joke about a movie then said it's meaningless. You wrote a comment on an article about a several hour lecture that you couldn't bother to read. My god, how poor is your attention span? You know you can seek help for that.

This project we are building is nothing people have ever seen yet. It should remain secret until prototype is done. One thing I can say is this privacy issue does not sell user's data to anyone. No forced advertising also. Our first target is not Facebook but Ebay and Groupon and Zynga and Yahoo. We are a nonprofit so this time around, Ebay will be fearful of our existence. We won't be selling one share to Ebay.